It was pretty clear from the start this wasn’t standard Chinese! I did wonder for a moment if it was some sort of bizarre Classical Chinese poem, before I remembered all of that Chinese alphabet nonsense I’d written about before.

“Make your way to Kowloon Walled City, the first checkpoint this leg. the last racer to arrive at this midway point in the leg, will be eliminated!”

(It also occurred to me you could quite easily make a Python script to solve these automatically by trying different character/letter swaps and seeing how many matches it gets with the ‘words’ list file included in most Linux distros. Anyway!)

So there we are! It looks like this person is on some sort of race challenge, so good luck to them, and I hope they make it to Kowloon Walled City in time.

I’m guessing the race organisers used one of the many “Chinese alphabet” swapping systems out there. This is one of the few legitimate uses of them, in my view!

Thanks to that reader for giving me something to do while I enjoyed my Saturday morning coffee